Inner List Design in new Views

Design, Usability Comments
Sep 232011

We are designing Views in TargetProcess and this is how Inner Lists look like.

We took the first concept from our last post — https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/uxtargetprocess/zCiquWLM_N0

I would like to highlight a couple of things.

Quick Add of Tasks and Bugs

Now you can quickly add a bug or task to the User Story without leaving a page.

Drag and drop to prioritize or change state

 You can easily change the priority or state of bugs and tasks using drag and drop.

Inline Edit

Change name or effort on the fly!


 

 

People assignments

Assign, reassign and find people quickly.

Effort Control

Time spent/remain indicator shows a relative size of tasks and bugs. You can clearly see what task is the largest and how much time is spent and remains.

All actions

You can use action popup to add time or convert a bug/task.

Collapsing Block

You can hide a large block to access relevant content quickly.

ID Indicator

In the inner list we combined entity-type indicator with the entity ID to use space better. 

We’ve already started the implementation and are going to release it in a month.

Posted by Alex Tsayun at 1:10 pm Tagged with: ,

TargetProcess v.2.21.18: Inline Edit in Views (beta)

Design, Release, v.3.0 Comments
Aug 192011

New beta User Story and Bug views are available in Kanban and Teams Board on double click. Go to Kanban Board and double click on any User Story or Bug.

Add tag, update name, description, effort or change release, iteration? It’s fast and easy now. From just a single view you can update all the fields.

Avatars are used in comments and assignments. It’s a nice way to recognize people fast and there’s no need to read names.

Assign people quickly. Find a person in a team using quick search and avatars.

You can even edit custom fields!

It’s possible to attach multiple attachments at once now. Moreover, you can just drop a file into a browser window as a popup view is open and the attachment will be added automatically.

As this is a beta version, not all actions are available so far. To convert/move entities, add time or attach user stories or bugs to request, use the old view and edit. In beta version ‘Old View’ and ‘Old Edit’ links are put under ‘Actions’ list.

As we continue working on the views, you’re welcome to have your say and send feedback.

Installer

We added a system settings check at the end of installation process, so errors are  identified quickly now.

2011-08-19 11:36:43 InstallHelper: PASSED: User BUILTIN\IIS_IUSRS has ReadAndExecute permissions on TargetProcess folder
2011-08-19 11:36:43 InstallHelper: PASSED: User NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller has FullControl permissions on TargetProcess folder
2011-08-19 11:36:43 InstallHelper: PASSED: User BUILTIN\Administrators has FullControl permissions on TargetProcess folder
2011-08-19 11:36:43 InstallHelper: PASSED: Application Pool Pipeline Mode is set to 'Classic'
2011-08-19 11:36:44 InstallHelper: PASSED: .NET framework is set to v2.0.50727
2011-08-19 11:36:44 InstallHelper: PASSED: Application Pool Identity is 'NetworkService'
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: .aspx handler is present in IIS configuration
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: Default document is enabled
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: Default.aspx is in default pages list
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: .NET framework 3.5 SP1 installed
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: MSMQ is installed correctly
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: MSMQ service is running
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: User NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE has FullControl permissions on queue Tp.Error
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: User NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM has FullControl permissions on queue Tp.Error
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: User NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE has FullControl permissions on queue Tp.PubSubStorage
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: PASSED: User NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE has FullControl permissions on queue Tp.InputCommand
2011-08-19 11:37:04 InstallHelper: System settings have been checked successfully.

Fixed Bugs

— Disabled TestTrackPro and SourceSafe plugins for OnDemand accounts
— Task is not assigned to the same release, if parent User Story is dragged to a release in Release Plan view
— ‘Open Assignments’ shows closed assignments as well
— Effort could be updated without edit permission
— An “out of memory” exception when attaching images

REST API Fixes

— Internal Error 500 if request has incomplete credentials for authorisation
— Add Required comment to Entity State

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 11:43 am Tagged with: , , , ,

New feature in 2.20.11: Bug Duplicates Management

Howto Comments
Nov 192010

Here’s how the bug duplicates functionality works and looks.

All the action links have been moved up to the right from Estimate & Effort box in the bug view;  a new option ‘Find Duplicate’ has been added at the end of these actions list.

find-link

It’s also available in the ‘Actions’ pull-down menu of Bugs list.

action-menu

As you click on this link,  you’ll get to the bug finder with the selected bug details on the left and lookup on the right. In the right panel you can search for duplicates by bug ID, name or state

lookup-small

As you select the replica bug from search results,  a pop-up with the details for both primary and duplicated bug appears.

duplicates-in-one-screen

If it turns out that they are not actually duplicates, you can click the lookup icon, get back to the search panel and go on searching for the appropriate one.

mark-duplicate

Now as you spotted duplicates,  you can choose which bug is primary and which one should be marked as duplicate. You can also change the state of a duplicate issue right here.

As both the primary and duplicate bugs are defined, you can see a new  ‘Duplicate’ section added to the primary bug:

detail-view

and a hyperlinked tag added to the duplicate:

tag-view

Duplicated bugs relations are powered by tags. You can quickly mark bug Y as a duplicate of bug X if you update it with a tag ‘duplicateOf#X’ (the finder pop-up does the same, this is just another option).

To undo the duplicate action you can just delete the tag from duplicate issue or click the ‘Unduplicate’ link in primary bug detail view.

All duplicates can be easily found in the bug list view by tag with our new wildcard search for tags feature! Just type ‘duplicate*’ to the ‘Tags’ text box and you’ve got the list of bugs filtered by all tags which start from ‘duplicate’.

filter-duplicate

You can filter this list by release/iteration, states, owner, etc.  for review or export the list to a CSV file.

We would be happy if you try new features and share your impressions and opinion on the  UX: ux@targetprocess.com

Posted by Nadia Bulynia at 6:50 pm Tagged with: ,

Why We Dropped Product Roadmap and Our Future Plans

Plugins, Process, Release, v.3.0 Comments
Nov 052010

We’ve dropped product Roadmap silently and it was not a good idea. I want to share the reasons behind this decision as well as our plans for the next several months.

Roadmap Problems

Roadmap has been publicly available over the past several years on our web site. We’d change it time and again and we’d promise something based on the roadmap, but then do not keep the promise. Some examples are Wiki integration and Help Desk Portal re-design. Wiki integration has lived in the roadmap from the beginning, but it is still an idea in the backlog. Some activities have been started on Help Desk Portal, but paused this Summer to focus on other things.

In a nutshell, roadmap was harmful to all parties. Customers relied on it and were disappointed if priorities had to be changed. We we were not able to stick to the priorities due to various internal and external reasons.

Now we have a single goal:

Create a life-changing agile project management tool for small to medium businesses

It means we want to create the best APM tool in the world for small to medium businesses. This is a very challenging goal, but we are really passionate about it and we know how to achieve it.

The short term strategy is very fluid though. There are SO many parts in TargetProcess we want to improve and make them simple, emotional, fast and useful. We know how to do that. The only problem is that we can’t focus on all parts at the same time, we have to prioritize carefully and pick 2-3 top things.

Currently, we think that the most important problems to address are:

  1. Performance
  2. Multiple teams support

Performance

Our ultimate goal is a sub-second response time for all pages on any reasonable load. Many areas in TargetProcess should be improved to make it happen. Currently we are focusing on a new plugins architecture that will significantly reduce server load. The other thing we’ve started is the complete redesign of View/Add/Edit pages. These pages are used most and ironically they are the slowest (even lists are faster).

We got rid of half-backed solutions this year and every major improvement is now preceded with the complete UX cycle incl. concepts brainstorming, prototyping, usability testing etc. Definitely, this slows us down at the start, but the final solutions will be outstanding in our opinion. For example, we are very happy with the navigation improvement this year. It still has some problems, but it was the first attempt to apply UX phase. The next solutions will be even better.

We’ve split into 2 teams that work on solutions almost independently with full focus. New plugins should be released on January and you will enjoy:

  1. Faster (much faster) performance
  2. Nice and easy-to-use API to create new plugins (currently it is quite hard to do)
  3. Mashups. It will be possible to inject UI on TargetProcess pages and create really powerful custom things

View/Add/Edit will be released in small batches and in the end you will have:

  1. Fast and painless navigation to Views everywhere
  2. Full inline edit in Views
  3. Quick Add everywhere

Multiple teams

Multiple teams support is very important for about ~50% of our customers. If you have several teams working on dependent projects, you will enjoy it as well. We believe no tools on the market support multiple teams planning and tracking nicely and expect to really simplify life of many people in agile software development soon.

The first part of the solution is UI to manage and track multiple teams. It is already defined and we are running usability tests to improve it. This UI (we call it ZoomBoard so far) will be included into TargetProcess as a beta this month (November) and you will be able to use it to plan and track several projects.

Then we are going to change business layer to support multiple teams. There is no clear estimate for that so far, but we expect to release it in 6 months. Multiple teams support will allow you to:

  1. Plan and track work on a team(s) level for several projects on one screen
  2. Plan and track releases and iterations on a team level, no matter how many projects the team works on
  3. Have complete visibility on an individual/person level

We know that there were just 2 major releases this year, but upcoming improvements will be outstanding in my personal and highly biased opinion. Only 2 customers participated in ZoomBoard usability tests so far, and here’s their feedback:

The new task board is a hammer! Definitely the best PM tool on the market

It will be a life-changing tool for agile project manager

I am sure you will like upcoming releases. These are significant steps toward our ultimate goal.

Best,
Michael Dubakov
TargetProcess founder and CEO

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 3:04 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

TargetProcess UX Concept Slides

Design, Process, Usability Comments
May 062010

Take a look at some presentations of upcoming UX concepts for some of TargetProcess features:

Teams progress presentation

Release planning

For more information on how are we moving along the UX path, see what we do in TargetProcess UX Group.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 7:24 pm Tagged with: ,

Kanban: Why 3 States in Cumulative Flow Diagram

Uncategorized Comments
Mar 222010

We have implemented cumulative flow diagram in TargetProcess v 2.15 as a tracking/reporting chart to get a quick overview of user stories in To Do, In Progress and Completed state:

cfd_default2

Why we have only 3 fixed states for cumulative flow diagram while all the states for User Stories and other entities are customizable? We could have enabled showing the count of User Stories in all the customized states, be it 6 or 7 or 8 states. But the visual diagram would have been too clogged this way. We had to either follow the reporting stats meticulously,  replicate all the states and counts in the digram and lose the visual UX of this chart, or to get it down to 3 basic  states such as ToDo, InProgress and Completed (all the customized states are just a variation for those 3 states, one way or another) and retain a good info-design.

Some people asked us to enable more detailed views in cumulative flow digram and we will consider implementing this in the future.

You’re welcome to submit your requests on cumulative flow diagram and other features to TargetProcess HelpDesk or to TargetProcess UX Group.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 6:50 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Re-designing ToDo Area: Prototype and Usability Testing

Design, Process Comments
Jan 182010

Long time no posts about ToDo area re-design, so back on track. In December we completed the dynamic prototype:

todo prototype

It was created in SketchFlow tool by Microsoft. Then we had the first formal usability tests on mere mortals (developers and testers from our company). 7 problems were found during usability testing (check usability test report (PDF, 900K) if you are curious).

Here is the conclusion from the usability test report:

This pilot testing of prototype by 5 people was extremely useful and enough to expose rather evident gaps and problem of implemented concept. After these issues are corrected, we will bravely start testing it with our customers.
However, from my point of view, this particular prototype has some disadvantages:
1. It’s very high level. From time to time during the testing we would say: ‘This is only a prototype, disregard this’, ‘Ooops , this doesn’t work, it’s prototype’. I guess we would have had different test results if we had a little bit more real proto. Our respondents would have been able to use different workarounds. But in this version of prototype they could perform only those actions which we had defined and covered by scripts related to scenarios. Anyway, they couldn’t look for a workaround and missed the new functionality because they had no choice.
2. Several of our respondents complained that actions are not marked out enough and are not easy to find at a glance.
— Nadia Bulynia

In general, we are happy with the results, but should find a better prototyping tool. It took too much effort to create the prototype using SketchFlow. Moreover, it is incomplete and has  serious limitations mentioned above.

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 5:40 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

Re-designing ToDo Area: Wireframes III

Design, Process, Usability Comments
Nov 032009

In the end of last week we shared new ToDo list concepts with TargetProcess UX group members. We have some feedback already, but it is interesting to receive more.

So what do you think about these ToDo list concepts?

Concept 1 (Clickable PDF. You may click on links that has dashed border)
Concept 2 (Static PDF)

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 6:55 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Re-designing ToDo Area: Wireframes II

Design, Process, Usability Comments
Oct 192009

Last Friday we discussed another ToDo list concept. The idea is to provide something similar to Kanban Board for personal tasks management, but more flexible.

Flexibility may be provided via custom grouping. For example, person may group tasks by user story vertically and by time frame horizontally and see something like on the wireframe below:

todo_kanban1

You may select another grouping, for example, by state, or by tag, or by custom field. As we see it will provide grate abilities to plan personal work with very creative patterns that we can’t even imagine. Maybe it is too complex, we are not sure so far. We’ll have usability testing phase on ready prototype to evaluate this solution.

Drag and drop may be used to plan personal work from backlog.

todo_kanban2

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 6:15 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Re-designing ToDo Area: Wireframes I

Design, Usability, v.3.0 Comments
Oct 162009

Yesterday we’ve created wireframes for the fist ToDo list concept. The main ideas is to have 3 areas for Today tasks, Tomorrow tasks and Later tasks. Use drag and drop to plan tasks for today or move them later. No calendar view, just plain list with 3 groups.

todo1

There were debates around Tomorrow tasks. Several people think that this group is not required and Today/Later will be sufficient.

todo1_2

Also this ToDo list provides an ability to see other people’s ToDo list as well as group tasks by various parameters. Time grouping is default (Today/Tomorrow/Later), but also it is possible to group by User Story, Project, Type or other properties.

todo1_1

Posted by Michael Dubakov at 12:36 pm Tagged with: , , ,
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